Catching up on my internet reading

I was reading this article at Newsarama--an interview with Grant Morrison about Final Crisis, including some discussion of how it ties in with events in Countdown. Now, I liked Countdown a lot, but it's true that some of what's in it doesn't seem to fully make sense. One thing he said jumped out at me,

although I’ve tried to avoid contradicting much of the twists and turns of that book as I can with the current Final Crisis scripts, the truth is, we were too far down the road of our own book to reflect everything that went on in Countdown, hence the disconnects that online commentators, sadly, seem to find more fascinating than the stories themselves

which seems to indicate that most of the problems I've seen mentioned were due to people just not knowing what was being touched on elsewhere. That's got to be a consistent problem with these big events, keeping everyone informed.

the best I can do is suggest that the somewhat contradictory depictions of Orion and Darkseid’s last-last-last battle that we witnessed in Countdown and DOTNG recently were apocryphal attempts to describe an indescribable cosmic event.

To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, when we started work on Final Crisis, J.G. and I had no idea what was going to happen in Countdown or Death Of The New Gods because neither of those books existed at that point. The Countdown writers were later asked to ‘seed’ material from Final Crisis and in some cases, probably due to the pressure of filling the pages of a weekly book, that seeding amounted to entire plotlines veering off in directions I had never envisaged, anticipated or planned for in Final Crisis.

The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sigh of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis and its satellite books. I’m sure both of these paths to enlightenment will find adherents of different temperaments.

Okay, that was a long quote :), but it did make me think of a few things. One is that I'm perfectly ready to enjoy Final Crisis, even without the sigh. Assuming it's enjoyable and I see no reason it wouldn't be.

Another is that it's amazing to me that they're even able to do these events at all. It's hard to imagine the organization that has to be involved, and I suppose it's not surprising if, every so often, the railroad tracks don't quite match up when they finally meet.

Yet other is that just because people like to talk about these sorts of inconsistencies doesn't mean that they don't enjoy the books as well. There's a long history of fans noticing when things in a comic just aren't quite right, dating back at least to the Silver Age when Marvel used to give out actual No-Prizes to fans who noticed and explained them. (I used to love it, as a kid, when someone would get a No-Prize in a letter column. It was clear to me even then that the comic creators sort of figured that the errors were inevitable and took the most reader-friendly approach they could think of to deal with them.) For a lot of folks, trying to make the pieces fit is part of the fun of comics.

And the last is that I'm not quite sure I'm smart enough to read comics by Grant Morrison. (Goes to Wikipedia to read about superstring theory...)